Victory!

We talked a few weeks ago about Jen’s obsession with size. Ahem. Let’s try that again. A few weeks ago we talked about Jen’s preference for all of the books in a series (and all of the chapters in a book) being approximately the same size. It’s a battle she’s been fighting on two fronts: trying to make Son of Science Novel big enough while simultaneously trying to make the third Divided Man book small enough.

But now we have a victory to announce! Huzzah! While the two of us work on writing SoSN at night, Jen’s spent her daytime hours taking her machete and blowtorch to Elsewhere’s Twin. Being third in line it’s had fewer editing passes, and it shows. Well, showed. It was too long, which in addition to making Jen’s eye twitch, meant it wasn’t the best book it could be. Now it’s had a trim and is 21,000 words shorter which puts it right in line with its two siblings in the series, and gives Jen a warm fuzzy feeling.

For the most part the edits were non-controversial, even if they were kind of major. For instance, there are now two fewer characters. We lopped out a couple of scenes. At least one scene got its point of view reassigned which meant Kent got to do a full rewrite. It’s been a whole thing. Even with all of that, most of our darlings escaped the firing squad.

That is, up until the final couple of chapters.

The finale in this one is kind of huge and there was disagreement in the writing cave about the desired degree of spectacle. Everyone’s favorite intrepid coauthors had hoped to have these edits done before last weekend’s planned family madness, but that didn’t happen. So we set it aside with every intention of diving in on Monday and finishing it up. Mother Nature had other plans though, and we lost power for 47 1/2 hours. Not that we were counting.

So, in addition to falling behind on email, and losing our 400+ day streaks in Duolingo, we lost all momentum on our writing projects. Grumble grumble.

But now we’re back on track. Kent got out his own machete and we menaced each other over the penultimate chapter, which is now resting comfortably. Neither of us sustained any lasting damage. The manuscript is still in need of smoothing and fine-tuning, which we’ll address in a month or so. Our publishing schedule leaves us time for at least two more drafts, and we’ll definitely take advantage of that.

We do it all for you, dear reader. All for you.